The hall smelled of lilies.
He had always found that strange — the way the living chose flowers that bloomed in graveyards to decorate their grief. As if the dead cared for beauty. As if the living weren't simply performing for each other.
He stood at the back of the parlor, apart from the rows of black-clad mourners, shoulders loose and hands still. Not out of respect.
Out of habit.
He had learned early that the best vantage point in any room was the one nobody thought to occupy.
Up at the front, the son of the deceased gripped the lectern.
The suit fit him better than his grief.
"My father lived a full life," the man said, voice wavering in that practiced way — a calculated tremor tuned to exactly the frequency that drew tears from strangers. "He was a good man. A happy man. And though he spoke often of the things he never got to do — the travels he postponed, the books he never wrote, the words he left unsaid —"
A pause.
Someone in the front row sobbed on cue.
"— he died with a smile. He always said his only regrets were the things he was almost able to do. But in the end... it was a life of happiness."
Silence rolled through the parlor like a tide.
Heads nodded. Shoulders shook. A woman pressed a handkerchief to her mouth as though grief were something that needed to be contained.
He watched all of it.
He felt none of it.
Happiness.
The word settled in his chest like a stone dropped into still water — sinking slowly, finding nothing to grip on the way down.
He looked at the casket. Polished mahogany. Brass handles. An expensive apology to a man who could no longer object.
Inside lay someone who had spent eighty years trading ambition for comfort. Who had looked at the ledger of his life and called the deficit acceptable. Who had died with a list of almosts long enough to wallpaper a mausoleum — and whose own son now stood at his altar, rebranding that failure as virtue.
A life of happiness.
His jaw tightened.
Regret was not bittersweet.
It was not the gentle ache of nostalgia the poets romanticized. It was not the dignified sorrow of a man who had simply run out of time. It was not something that deserved a eulogy, or lilies, or the nodding heads of strangers who hadn't earned the right to mourn a life they'd never understood.
Regret was a cancer.
Silent. Systemic. Consuming everything it touched from the inside while the host kept smiling and insisting they were fine.
If you died wishing you had done more, you had not lived.
You had waited.
You had stood at every crossroads in your life and chosen the road with the better lighting, the more comfortable ground, the lower likelihood of falling — and then wondered, at the end of it all, why you had never arrived anywhere worth being.
The son continued. Something about legacy. Something about cherished memories and a man who had touched the lives of everyone around him.
He stopped listening.
He did not want a legacy assembled from the inventory of his failures. He did not want flowers or mourners performing grief they had rehearsed in the car on the way over.
If he were ever in that box —
He would want the room to feel smaller without him in it.
He would want his absence to register on the world's balance sheet like a wound that refused to close.
He turned away before the first handful of dirt struck the wood.
He didn't know, then, how little time he had left to prove it.